BBCNOW/Fischer; London Sinfonietta/Atherton

Thursday 6 August 2009 18.00 EDT
First published on Thursday 6 August 2009 18.00 EDT

The London Sinfonietta has been championing the works of living composers for more than four decades now, and Harrison Birtwistle's music has been ever-present throughout. No less than 22 of his pieces have been introduced by the ensemble, many of which it also commissioned. To mark the composer's 75th birthday last month, the earliest three of those bespoke pieces were brought together for Prom 27, a late-night affair conducted by the Sinfonietta's co-founder, David Atherton.

The sequence moved chronologically backwards, beginning with the little concert opener from 1978, Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, an array of spiky musical clockworks that move in and out of prominence to create a brilliant mechanism, and continuing with the mysterious Silbury Air premiered a year earlier.

But even though the visceral power of the writing was diluted in the Albert Hall, it was the magnificent Verses for Ensembles of 1969 that made the biggest impact. It was one of the works that put Birtwistle on the British musical map. Atherton showed, too, that it still packs every ounce of its original punch.

There had been a rather Birtwistlian central idea in Heinz Holliger's "monody for large orchestra" called (S)irató, whose UK premiere had been sandwiched between Mendelssohn and Prokofiev by Thierry Fischer and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Prom 26, earlier in the evening.

Composed in 1993 as a memorial to Holliger's teacher Sándor Veress, the work is a powerfully sustained 15-minute elegy, driven by a writhing, angry melodic line that sometimes unravels into multiple voices or becomes suffocated by decorative detail, heaves itself up to a huge climax, and finally evaporates in constellations of harmonics.